Is Donald Trump the Antichrist?

As many of you know, from my late teens to my late twenties I was an evangelical Christian. Back then, being an evangelical didn’t have the automatic political association it has today. We were, however, interested in the emergence of a political figure, a character known to us as the Antichrist. He was, according to a skewed interpretation of the Bible and the mythos of the time, to be a powerful figure who would emerge in the End Times and deceive many of us.

We were smugly self-assured back then that we would not be among the deceived, of course. We possessed the same hubris that many alive today have, who imagine how they would have behaved toward Hitler. For some reason that we were never able to justify beyond our confidence, we believed we would be different.

For one thing we were prepared for the Antichrist. We would know him when we saw him. We would spot him coming from a long way off.

What was the Antichrist going to be like? He would be slick and amoral. Many would adore him for baffling reasons. And get this: he was going to be an atheist, or at least not a practising Christian. He paradoxically was going to pretend to be a Christian and declare himself to be God. Many of us believed he was going to take over the government of the United States, possibly become president, and transform America into a godless machine of terror and oppression.

At some point the Lord was going to return and set everything to rights, punish the sinners and lift up the faithful, and so on. But the Antichrist would finally be vanquished at a battle at Armageddon, a literal patch of ground in northern Israel.

Had Donald Trump shown up and entered politics in my evangelical days, we would have no doubt been convinced right away that he was the Antichrist. We had already cycled through Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Trump would have made a far likelier choice. Trump would have been a no-brainer.

Our belief stemmed in part from the muddy and ambiguous chapter 13 in the Book of Revelation, where John the Beloved speaks of “the Beast.” Interestingly, according to John, the Beast receives a near-fatal head wound from which he miraculously recovers. Back in my evangelical days that would have been the final proof. Trump, after all, got his ear bloodied in an assassination attempt. You don’t have to work very hard to convince the true believer. And, of course, many MAGA fanatics exaggerated the extent of Trump’s bloodied ear.

My question is twofold. First, what happened to my friends who were evangelicals back in my day? The answer is that some, like me, fell away and became atheists or agnostics. The rest remain in the evangelical fold. And they are, all but one, dyed-in-the-wool Trumpists. I found this out by tracking them down on Facebook. None of them speak of the Antichrist any more, as near as I can tell.

My second question is this. Would I have become a Trump supporter had I remained an evangelical? I don’t know. Possibly. I certainly hope not. But in the end, who can really tell? My evangelical friends were intelligent. Most of them were college graduates. What is it about Trump, who is objectively revolting, that charmed them into falling for him? I honestly don’t know. It’s a mystery so profound that it’s tempting to turn to the supernatural for an explanation.

I cannot account for how Trump, who is a profoundly stupid man, managed to deceive so many people with such clumsy and unattractive tools. If it were in a novel or a movie I would neither be willing nor able to suspend my disbelief. Yet somehow, some way, Donald Trump, a clown, a fool, an unsavoury, unsubtle egomaniac, has pulled it off.

It’s too facile to turn to magic in the absence of an explanation. For now I will simply have to admit that I don’t know how he did it, nor how it’s possible that anyone could. Another thing is the question of what happened to the narrative of the Antichrist in the evangelical community? He was a hot topic in my day. Now he’s hardly ever mentioned. Well, that’s a question that isn’t quite so mysterious, is it?